Re: Radare2 and Cutter in an unmanageable dependency after project fork
On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 12:32:11AM +0100, Henrik Nordström wrote:
I recently took ownership of Radare2 after it was orphaned,
unfortunately unknowing of the current turmult in the Radare2 project.
Now realizing that it has a dependent Fedora package Cutter (cutter-re)
which is at the edge of this turmult. And pushing an update of Radare2
will break Cutter.
It is not a simple clean-cut update to keep the cutter-re package alive
as Cutter has split from the Radare2 project, and in the process forked
Radare2 as Rizin. Updating of Cutter would require Rizin to be packaged
for Fedora.
The Radare2 project in turn have forked Cutter as R2Cutter. But
R2Cutter is not Cutter. And Rizin is not Radare2.
What is the proper action to deal with situations like this?
Seems to be a tough call. There's a lot of activity going on in both
projects. There's more commits in rizin, but many of of them are related
to the renaming, so that doesn't matter much. (Many commits are cherry
picked between the projects too.)
There seem to be many good technical ideas in the rizin fork (e.g. the
switch to meson instead of a custom build system, removal of unstable
code), which would make packaging easier. But in such splits it's
always hard to say which fork will "win" (or even if they don't both
die...).
I agree that packaging both doesn't make sense.
My gut feeling is that it's much better to keep the graphical interface
than not, i.e. either cutter or r2cutter should stay in the distro.
The decision about the graphical interface could even determine which
fork is followed.
It'd be nice to get more info from the people involved.
Zbyszek